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The method by which one man might be pinpointed in the vastness of
all Eternity was the problem tackled by the versatile Frank Belknap
Long in this story. And as all minds of great perceptiveness know,
it would be a simple, human quality he'd find most effective even in
solving Time Space.

the
man
from
time

by ... Frank Belknap Long

Deep in the Future he found the
answer to Man's age old problem.

Daring Moonson, he was called. It was a proud name, a brave name. But
what good was a name that rang out like a summons to battle if the man
who bore it could not repeat it aloud without fear?

Moonson had tried telling himself that a man could conquer fear if he
could but once summon the courage to laugh at all the sins that ever
were, and do as he damned well pleased. An ancient phrase that damned
well. It went clear back to the Elizabethan Age, and Moonson had tried
picturing himself as an Elizabethan man with a ruffle at his throat and
a rapier in his clasp, brawling lustily in a tavern.

In the Elizabethan Age men had thrown caution to the winds and lived
with their whole bodies, not just with their minds alone. Perhaps that
was why, even in the year 3689, defiant names still cropped up. Names
like Independence Forest and Man, Live Forever!

It was not easy for a man to live up to a name like Man, Live Forever!
But Moonson was ready to believe that it could be done. There was
something in human nature which made a man abandon caution and try to
live up to the claims made for him by his parents at birth.

It must be bad, Moonson thought. It must be bad if I can't control the
trembling of my hands, the pounding of the blood at my temples. I am
like a child shut up alone in the dark, hearing rats scurrying in a
closet thick with cobwebs and the tapping of a blind man's cane on a
deserted street at midnight.

Tap, tap, tap nearer and nearer through the darkness. How soon would
the rats be swarming out, blood fanged and wholly vicious? How soon
would the cane strike?

He looked up quickly, his eyes searching the shadows. For almost a month
now the gleaming intricacies of the machine had given him a complete
sense of security. As a scholar traveling in Time he had been accepted
by his fellow travelers as a man of great courage and firm
determination.

For twenty seven days a smooth surface of shining metal had walled him
in, enabling him to grapple with reality on a completely adult level.
For twenty seven days he had gone pridefully back through Time, taking
creative delight in watching the heritage of the human race unroll
before him like a cineramoscope under glass.

Watching a green land in the dying golden sunlight of an age lost to
human memory could restore a man's strength of purpose by its serenity
alone. But even an age of war and pestilence could be observed without
torment from behind the protective shields of the Time Machine. Danger,
accidents, catastrophe could not touch him personally.

To watch death and destruction as a spectator in a traveling Time
Observatory was like watching a cobra poised to strike from behind a
pane of crystal bright glass in a zoological garden.

You got a tremendous thrill in just thinking: How dreadful if the glass
should not be there! How lucky I am to be alive, with a thing so deadly
and monstrous within striking distance of me!

For twenty seven days now he had traveled without fear. Sometimes the
Time Observatory would pinpoint an age and hover over it while his
companions took painstaking historical notes. Sometimes it would retrace
its course and circle back. A new age would come under scrutiny and more
notes would be taken.

But a horrible thing that had happened to him, had awakened in him a
lonely nightmare of restlessness. Childhood fears he had thought buried
forever had returned to plague him and he had developed a sudden,
terrible dread of the fogginess outside the moving viewpane, the way the
machine itself wheeled and dipped when an ancient ruin came sweeping
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